The Ian Fleming Miscellany (6 page)

One of Ian Fleming's most important tasks at Naval Intelligence was to submit ideas, however far-fetched. He would never propose a scheme by means of a detailed report that would take Godfrey an hour to read and Ian himself much longer to write. Instead, he devised his own best practice. He began by bullet pointing the general idea, neatly typed on one sheet of paper: concept, aim, results of a successful outcome, potential drawbacks. As he grew confident these missives were signed with a big bold F. If the concept were halfway to being a plan that he thought would work, he would say so and express willingness to submit more evidence and some routes for consultation, if required. Godfrey usually wanted to know more.

Fleming remained interested in rumour for undermining morale and deceiving antagonists. ‘The invention of rumour is not a difficult matter. Its dissemination is', he wrote. Two outfits were already tasked with the job. They'd both been in place since before the war and neither had achieved a great deal, despite coming at the problem from a slightly different angle and working in collaboration. Department EH, at Electra House in Moorgate, was the seat of Foreign Office propaganda. The phone lines of foreign embassies were conveyed by direct cable through Electra House, and its staff, having listened in, came up with destructive rumours. Section D of the SIS, based at the St Ermin's Hotel behind St James's Park tube station, set about disseminating those rumours abroad. As far as Fleming could tell, the stories never seemed to take hold. On reflection, this is not surprising, since no sensible SIS agent working undercover in enemy territory would incur suspicion by spreading ‘information' favourable to the other side.

Fleming recommended a multi-pronged approach. Any given rumour should be spread abroad by newspapers, ‘Freedom' radio, diplomats and leaks to POWs in Britain, although the censors who read POWs' letters would have to be tipped off.

Effective disinformation should lead directly to desired enemy action. It was important to keep German forces occupied away from strategic targets, and Godfrey seized on one of Fleming's ideas with particular enthusiasm. In essence, it was the scapegoat ploy, thousands of years old: the goat tied to a post to attract the wolf away from the flock. But this goat wouldn't be tethered; the wolf would have to chase it. It would be a radio station broadcasting from a ship in the North Sea. ‘The one infallible and inexhaustible draw for German fire', wrote Godfrey, ‘would be any form of radio propaganda station.' Fleming suggested a fast cruiser, accompanied by two destroyers and air cover during limited daily hours of transmission. An alternative protection might be Q boats, the kind of camouflaged, armed, decoy boats that had had been used to deter attack in the First World War. Godfrey thought a couple of submarines would suffice, with other defences ‘on call'.

They agreed that this would not be soft propaganda. There would be no attempt to ingratiate. Listeners would hear authoritative British voices speaking German, since native German speakers would give the Nazis the excuse to claim that these were German Jews telling lies. The broadcasters would explain the true situation of the German air, land and sea forces under Nazi command, and the consequences for the German people. The Nazis were always boasting about their command of the North Sea; this would make nonsense of that. ‘The Germans would certainly be enraged', Godfrey noted gleefully.

So the plan had two objectives: to undermine morale in Northern Germany and to divert German troops from aggression elsewhere. Its success relied on the radio ship being able always to dodge German explosives, whether delivered by air attack or from undetected minefields.

The risk was that failure would leave the Admiralty with egg on its face and the loss of a valuable ship. (Casualties were not mentioned.) Godfrey admitted that in daylight hours, there was a serious risk of being bombed. But, he said, the service might operate only on cloudy or foggy days. He was perhaps carried away by enthusiasm.

All this was seriously considered. Questions were asked about the height and weight of masts and the best time of day to broadcast. Finally the plan was rejected as too risky, expensive and technically difficult. However, the impetus for it – the perception that hearts and minds were not being converted fast enough in occupied lands – was shared by others and contributed to an overhaul of black propaganda services.

There were at least as many rejected plans as daring successes. In February 1940, Fleming came up with another plot. This was to flood Germany with forged currency, causing a run on the German mark, a scenario that might panic Germans into overthrowing the regime. His memo helpfully pointed out that Waterlows made the British currency and ‘young Waterlow' worked at Electra House, Moorgate. This too was rejected.

Then there was the initially promising plan to steal an Enigma machine. The cryptographers of Naval Intelligence were particularly keen on this one, because although Wehrmacht Enigma (used by the German army and air force) could be read, naval Enigma could not; the German navy had been far-sighted enough to specify its own, dedicated version of the code. Ian hatched a plan to ditch a Heinkel, with a fake German crew still aboard, in the Channel within sight of a small German minesweeper, and once rescued, to murder the sailors and sail to Britain in possession of the boat's Enigma coding machines. He was not personally allowed to participate. Godfrey told him that he knew too much to risk being captured. However, he could direct the operation from Dover. In the event it fizzled out. Finding a small minesweeper, and the likelihood of a Heinkel plunging straight to the sea floor and taking the German-speaking crew down with it, were the points against.

He also invented plots for sabotage. In one, German ships marooned at Spanish ports were bought wholesale by British money and taken out of action. Another similar one was to buy up barges on the Danube, to prevent Germans getting access to Romanian oilfields; yet another, to scuttle other Danube barges to block Germany's access to the Black Sea and its raw materials supplied by neutral countries. After that one, German news media claimed that the Romanians had ‘only narrowly' prevented British sabotage at the Iron Gate dams. It had been botched by a fellow whose grip and courage Fleming had badly misjudged.

When Ian returned from Bordeaux in June 1940, Michael Fleming was missing in France and their older brother Peter seemed likely to join a shady outfit run by his friend Colin Gubbins, recently returned from Norway.

Ivar Bryce, his friend from childhood, was doing his bit, thanks to instructions from Ian to see somebody at the Passport Office on Fifth Avenue, New York. After his interview there, he had been sent to meet another Englishman at the Westbury Hotel. He was then put to work on the thirty-sixth floor of one of the Rockefeller Center buildings. His boss was William Stephenson, the British passport control officer. Bryce didn't at first know the significance of that title; he claimed later, perhaps disingenuously, that he thought he was working for ‘an obscure branch of the Consular Service' on their Latin American desk. He did notice that all continents were dealt with and different staff were forever coming and going.

Late in 1940, Bryce was told that he was to work in South America recruiting agents for a new operation, the Special Operations Executive. After Dunkirk, Section D, Department EH, and another outfit devoted to guerrilla warfare and sabotage, had been combined into the much better resourced SOE. It worked out of the old Metropole Hotel on the corner of the Strand and Northumberland Avenue and ran both male and female British and foreign agents who were engaged to live as civilians abroad while gathering information and assisting, where necessary, in guerrilla warfare, propaganda, resistance and sabotage.

Across the Atlantic, the international department in the Rockefeller Center was known in London as BSC, British Security Co-ordination. William Stephenson, code name Intrepid, had been in post for a long time, and despite tireless diplomacy, the Americans still were not in the war. Ewen Montagu's wife, Iris, the daughter of Victorian artist Solomon J. Solomon, had worked for Stephenson in New York before war began; even then they had been busy turning out black propaganda aimed at Nazi sympathisers in America and other propaganda aimed at getting USA to join in. But still, for preoccupied Americans in Idaho or California, Hitler was a long way away.

Stephenson, himself a Canadian, knew Hitler really was not. He was worried that this vast, rich country, still smugly convinced of its own exceptionalism and invincibility, lacked a full-time spying service of its own. Roosevelt agreed.

For the first fourteen months of the war, the US Ambassador in London was Joe Kennedy. Kennedy had been a convinced appeaser in the 1930s, and now he insisted to all Washington – especially after Dunkirk – that the British were definitely heading for defeat. American resources must be reserved for use at home.

Roosevelt nevertheless decided that the US must look after its interests in the rest of the world or America would be stuck between two expansionist powers: Japan on one side and Germany on the other. He asked General William J. Donovan to set up a secret service along the lines of the British one – really secret, its mere existence unacknowledged. General Donovan was a former Wall Street lawyer, popular and clever, a man of wide interests and pleasant temper. He travelled to London in 1940, and many times after that, to find out as much as he could from the Joint Intelligence committee meetings and the security directors involved. When he returned, he confirmed to Roosevelt that Kennedy was wrong. The British were a bulwark against oppression and they needed money. Roosevelt lent it to them, in exchange for 99-year leases on base stations worldwide.

Joe Kennedy and his family fled London for the country when the Blitz began in September 1940. This made him extremely unpopular in London, where even the King and Queen and their children stuck it out, and by November he was no longer ambassador. Kennedy's views continued to find favour in America, though, and he was dead against an international intelligence service.

In August 1940, after his visits to France and America, Fleming began to plan Operation Goldeneye. A couple of months before, Spain had stopped being ‘neutral' in favour of the suspicious ‘non-belligerent'. Madrid, Lisbon and Gibraltar were pullulating with spies and counter-spies. The British urgently needed reliable watchers in Spain. If Franco were to join the Germans, Naval Intelligence must be fully prepared with a secret unit in Gibraltar to commit acts of sabotage and communicate with friends on the mainland. If the Germans ever gained a foothold in Andalucia, across the narrow Straits from the positions they already held in North Africa, they would undoubtedly mine, and otherwise block, the passage to the Mediterranean. For this reason Gibraltar was among the most strategically vulnerable locations of the war.

Ian visited Madrid in February 1941. His contact there was Alan Hillgarth, naval attaché, another of the many adventurers who at this time ended up in the British diplomatic service. Hillgarth was a good friend of Winston Churchill, and an accomplished spymaster. He knew everybody, ran agents and greased palms generously and to good effect. He had successfully incentivised contacts in key positions, including Spanish generals and senior government officials.

Hillgarth discussed the Spanish political position with Fleming. Sam Hoare, the Ambassador, a pre-war appeaser, was terrified of offending the pro-Nazi side in Spain. The Government was pretty well evenly divided in its loyalties. Franco himself owed Germany a favour since Hitler's government had supported him in the Civil War, but he was a pragmatist.

Fleming initiated a cypher office in Gibraltar, to link it with London. Gibraltarian civilians were being evacuated, fortifications reinforced and the Rock, with its tunnels, occupied by some of the 30,000 service personnel to be stationed in Gibraltar. The place presented a formidable defensive position. History recorded that succeeding occupiers had held it for hundreds of years at a time. But Fleming wanted to know how far the German navy had already arranged to hinder shipping in the Straits. And recognising that a successful invasion of the Rock by Axis units could never be ruled out, he also installed a back-up unit in Tangier.

In Spain he met William J. Donovan for the first time. The American general was on a ‘fact-finding tour'. If Donovan were to make a successful pitch for a big, expensive new secret intelligence department, he would need to have its architecture drawn up by someone with a good understanding of what such an entity could and should do and how to do it; and Stephenson had recommended Fleming. Fleming was keen. He also suggested they should work as an Anglo-American Joint Intelligence committee to co-ordinate efforts to invade North Africa – when possible; at this time the US had no official foreign intelligence service and was not on a war footing.

In May of 1941 Admiral Godfrey flew to America with his assistant, Commander Ian Fleming. Fleming and Godfrey arrived at La Guardia at the same time as Schiaparelli, and quite by accident they ended up in the background of her picture in
The
New York Times
, taken by a paparazzo. They had rooms at the St Regis, then owned by Viscount Astor, who was in a position to talk about intelligence to Roosevelt. They were to see Stephenson at the Rockefeller Center, and discuss with him, and American naval officers, the security of American ports.

Ian ‘introduced Godfrey to the Morgan banking clan', as Andrew Lycett succinctly puts it. Together they went to the fashionable 21 Club. They read the news that HMS
Hood
had been sunk by the destroyer
Bismarck
. A couple of days later, the
Bismarck
was sunk. New York suddenly seemed rather unreal.